ROBERT BAKER José Donoso’s El obsceno pdjaro de la noche: Thoughts on “Schizophrenic” Form Donoso’s El obsceno pdjaro de la noche is formed by a movement of endless displacements within a structure that is at the same time finite and ordered. In this sense, the novel is as a figure of one of the more influential models in contemporary thought, namely, that of a differential structure non-complete as a very dimension of that structure, a model developed from Saussure’s linguistic analyses, extended to the entirety of the social by thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss, and theorized in terms of the uncloseability of such a structure in the work of Derrida (and indeed, Derrida’s notion of a structure with no center would seem to provide an excellent description of Donoso's novel).! According to this model, and as we see in this text, no subject, no “present” or context, and no “meaning” is understood to be self-identical; rather, any such “identity” is always already inhabited by clements of the wider differential field (the field of the entire social) which is the very possibility of the emergence of such “identities.” This novel reveals in the extreme the displacing movement produced by relationality, thus evoking the general disordering of time, space, and subjecthood that has come to be named the “schizophrenic” sensibility of the postmodern period (a figurative use of the term that is perhaps problematic). In any event, we can safely assert that the narrator of the novel is, in a clinical sense, schizophrenic; we have also to note that he is at the same time paranoiac. This paranoiac element Revista de Eztudios Hispdnicas26 (1992) Copyright (¢) 2006 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Washington University